10 Top Tools for Novelists
The software featured in this article is designed to meet the specialised needs of a budding novelist. There's the finest open source distraction-free tools, software designed to create visual novels, and tools to help capture and visualise ideas.

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"The most Linux on one floppy disk."
rescue/panic/emergency diskette,
or shirt-pocket Linux toolkit. It's goal iscontain as much stuff as possible on 1 floppy disk, keep it self contained, build under itself, and try to make it behave like a normal system.
rescue and recovery functions get priority hot

Atomic Linux REMOTE 1 is a floppy distro designed to turn an old PC into a networked appliance that uses its parallel port to interface with relays and switches. You connect to it by ethernet and control things via the browser of another machine. It makes a good remote control for lighting, motors and similar.

blueflops is a 2-floppy Linux distribution with a graphical web browser ("links" with SVGALIB) and a text-mode IRC client ("epic4"). The kernel version is 2.6.11.7 with almost all of the Ethernet drivers and PPP support (for dial-up connections).

Yet another minimalist Linux distribution that is contained entirely on a single floppy disk. It supports only single user mode, and is intended as a repair/rescue/emergency distribution. bootE Linux supports only single user mode and is contained entirely on a single floppy disk. The only text editor we have chosen to include is the very compact e3 editor, primarily because it is so small and because it is able to mimic the key bindings of some commonly used editors.

Coyote Linux is a single floppy distribution of Linux that is designed for the sole purpose of sharing an Internet connection. The floppy can be created using either a Microsoft Windows wizard, or by using a set of Linux shell scripts. In addition to being designed to have very low hardware requirements, the floppy release of Coyote Linux is able to provide the performance and uptime that is expected from any Linux based system.

Fd Linux is a very tiny floppy distribution of Linux, set to fit on one floppy disk (kernel and root fs are combined!). All binaries are based on Red Hat. Fd Linux has been optimized, tested and is able to run on as little as a 386 with 8MB of RAM.

Floppix is a teaching tool; it is a very small subset of Debian/ GNU Linux that fits on two 3.5" 1.4Mb diskettes. The current version is derived from Debian 2.1 (slink), copyright under the GNU GPL "copyleft". It provides a platform to practice linux commands and experiment with simple system administration. Floppix has no hard drive support; you cannot access, modify, damage or destroy anything installed on the hard drive. For this reason, Floppix works safely in the lab, at home or at work.

floppyfw is a router with the advanced firewall-capabilities in Linux that fits on one single floppy disc. Features include: Access lists, IP-masquerading (Network Address Translation), connection tracked packet filtering and (quite) advanced routing. Package for traffic shaping is also available. Requires only a 386sx or better with two network interface cards, a 1.44MB floppy drive and 12MByte of RAM. It has a very simple packaging system.

FloppyGate is a floppy linux distribution ready to be used as an ip masquerade firewall. It is build on a debian woody distribution with a 2.2.17 kernel. FloppyGate turns your diskless x86 computer into a complete firewall.

muLinux is a minimalistic Linux distribution, suitable for old computers. X11, GCC, VNC, SSH, Samba, Netscape etc. are supported on additional addon floppies. It can be installed from DOS/Win9x or Linux, without repartitioning.

Nuclinux is a single floppy linux-distribution which fits on one 3.5 inch floppy. It's designed primarily to connect to the Internet from a networked machine. Features: bash 1.4, links, ftp-server (muddle ftp), telnet server, etc.

Pocket Linux is an almost minimal, one floppy linux system designed to quickly convert PC workstation into secure linux-based workstation using ssh to connect to remote host (other networking clients are also supported). It supports bootp for determining host IP and other network parameters (there's also manual configuration possible, but bootp is recommended).

Serverdisk is a diskette distro that offers services normally associated with HD or CD distributions. These include httpd and ftpd. This is not a rescue disk and strives to be in a separate class of its own. It currently only takes up 900kb on disk.